ACADEMIA

Manufacturers and engineering firms in the advanced composites sector can now use new software developed at Purdue University to reduce the design cycle of materials and structures, and analyze models too complex for existing methods.

AnalySwift LLC, a commercial software provider, has launched SwiftComp, technology that provides efficient, high-fidelity modeling of composites and reduces analysis times without a loss of accuracy, while capturing details of composites that were unreachable using traditional methods. The company licensed the technology, which was developed by Wenbin Yu, associate professor in Purdue's School of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Allan Wood, president and CEO at AnalySwift, said the company's customers span several traditional sectors including aerospace, automotive and energy.

"These sectors face challenges including getting products to market more quickly, designing earlier in the process and improving technical R&D capabilities," he said. "Imagine the competitive advantages engineers and companies could achieve when reducing analysis time from days to minutes. SwiftComp can make that happen."

Wood said SwiftComp is more versatile than traditional analysis software.

"The software can quickly and easily calculate the effective properties of composites and heterogeneous structures and materials including composite laminates, woven composites, stiffened structures, sandwich structures, corrugated structures and other buildup structures and heterogeneous materials," he said. "As long as a building block for the structure can be identified, SwiftComp can compute the best structural model for use in macroscopic structural analysis. It also computes the local stresses in the microstructure, which is essential for strength and failure of composites."

Yu said SwiftComp strengthens the manufacturing and engineering sectors' ability to harness the full potential of advanced composite materials for various applications including sandwich structures, wind turbine blades, and composite aerostructures, cars and rotor blades.

"SwiftComp takes the fundamental building block of material as input, then outputs the structural properties needed for macroscopic analysis," he said. "The software can be used for virtual testing of composites or as a plugin to power conventional FEA codes with high-fidelity multiscale modeling for composites."

Wood said Yu's codes have been used by hundreds of researchers in industry, academia and national laboratories.

"Wenbin Yu is well known and highly respected in our field and he brings real-world solutions in the areas of structural mechanics, micromechanics, multiphysics modeling and multiscale modeling," he said. "Licensing SwiftComp further enables AnalySwift to deliver on our motto, 'Right results. Right away.' We are excited to demonstrate its value to engineers and companies that model composite materials and structures."

SwiftComp is available through cdmHUB, an online platform hosted at Purdue that encourages users to evaluate emerging and existing composite simulation tools, and hosts simulation challenges to educate and unify the composites community.